Book Review: The Great Influenza By John M. Barry

The Great Influenza
By John M. Barry

The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more human beings than any single epidemic in history. Even the black death of the Middle Ages, while it killed a greater percentage of the population, did not match the shear number of casualties of the "Spanish Flu".

John M. Barry recounts the terrifying year of the Great Influenza, which struck in the midst of World War I, and devastated military encampments and civilian communities alike. Spreading rapidly in crowded barracks and tenements, and aided and abetted by the politics of wartime censorship, the effects of the influenza pandemic were devasting.

Barry focuses on the medical researchers who bravely fought against the epidemic, beginning his story years before the outbreak with the founding of the Johns Hopkins Medical School and the beginning of the modern science of medicine in the Unites States.

Barry manages to interweave the stories of the researchers with the day-to-day spread of the pandemic, and gives a good overview of the mechanisms by which influenza spreads and kills. He makes the case that this is an event that could easily repeat itself. Our understanding of viruses and vaccines has increased tremendously since 1918, but so has our ability to spread a new virus strain around the world rapidly by means of air travel.

This is important history as well as a cautionary tale of a danger that is still very real.

The Great Influenza was book #17 in my goal of reading 50 books in 2010.